I left the South in 1963 and was living in Morristown, New Jersey, when the March on Washington took place, so I watched it on television instead.
CLAUDETTE COLVINAs long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
More Claudette Colvin Quotes
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That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.
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I’d like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.
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I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn’t satisfied by.
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What do we have to do to make God love us?’ I always grew up with that. I always used to go around thinking that. ‘God loved the white people better. He must’ve. That’s why he made them white.’
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I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.
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When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.
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I lost most of my friends. Their parents had told them to stay away from me, because they said I was crazy, I was an extremist.
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I’ve always told my children that once they go out into the world, they must have two heads and two minds: one to keep grounded, the other to deal with corporate America.
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Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn’t the case at all.
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I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.
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I was ostracized by my community.
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A lot has changed since I grew up, but there’s still a long way to go. I don’t think we can move forward with Donald Trump as the president. There’s a disconnect there. We don’t want to regress, we want progress.
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There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn’t even go into the same restaurants.
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I wanted the young African-American girls also on the bus to know that they had a right to be there, because they had paid their fare just like the white passengers.
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I always tell young people to hold on to their dreams. And sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right even if you have to stand alone.
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